YouTube was hard to reach this week following action by Pakistan to block access inside its borders for its hosting of a “blasphemous” video clip.

Analysis suggests the block was taken up by net hardware that routes data effectively cutting off the site.

But a spokeswoman for Pakistan’s telecoms authority said the problem was caused by a “malfunction” elsewhere.

Dead end

“We are not hackers. Why would we do that?” Shahzada Alam Malik, head of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), told the AP news service.

The Peshawar office of the PTA issued a blocking order for YouTube last week in a bid to block access to a video clip the Pakistani government regarded as “very blasphemous”.

Analysis by net monitoring firm Renesys shows that the problems getting through to YouTube began as a result of the action taken by Pakistan Telecom to implement the block.

Essentially, Pakistan Telecom took over some of the net addresses assigned to YouTube.

Crucially the path it offered to this group of addresses was faster than the usual one used by the hardware, or routers, that speed traffic around the internet.

Pakistan Telecom let this address change propagate to the routers of one of its partners - PCCW.

Routers are constantly in search of faster ways to get the data passing through them to its destination so news about this faster path started propagating across many of the net’s routers.

However, because Pakistan Telecom was stopping the traffic reaching YouTube all the data reached a dead end.

“While it is hard to describe exactly how widely this hijacked prefix was seen, we estimate that it was seen by a bit more than two-thirds of the internet,” wrote Martin Brown of Renesys in a company blog post analysing the sequence of events.

The problems getting through to YouTube were most severe for two hours on Sunday but the problem was cleared up soon after.

Access to YouTube was restored in Pakistan on Tuesday when the video clip was removed.

The Oscars made history Sunday night. But not the good kind.

The three-hour-plus ABC telecast averaged 32 million viewers, the smallest crowd on record—ever, per Nielsen Media Research estimates.

The show “topped” the 2003 ceremony, which, with 33 million viewers, was Oscar’s previous low.

Even worse, if possible, the show was a shadow of its 2007 self, shedding more than 8 million viewers, or one-fifth of its audience, from last year to this. Even in an age where everything is the lowest rated something ever, that’s a significant blood loss.

Oscar’s main trouble seemed to be female trouble: Based on ratings of the show’s prime-time hours, it struck out with the chicks.

Last year, with host Ellen DeGeneres at the helm, the Oscars was up across the board with women viewers.

This year, with male Jon Stewart dealing, the show looked to be down, a lot, in all the major female demographics.

The show’s disconnect with its target audience might have stemmed not so much from Stewart, who generally won good reviews, but from the top nominees, a pack of films with nary a female touch, led by Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, that Stewart himself jokingly described as “psychopathic killer movies.”

Another ratings challenge cropped up when Hollywood’s biggest night turned into another continent’s crowning glory.

For the first time since the 1965 Oscar ceremony, all four acting awards went to residents of Europe. Perhaps not surprisingly, the ‘65 show, honoring the international likes of Zorba the Greek, suffered the ceremony’s third smallest audience share of the 1960s.

For whatever reason, this year’s Oscars repelled viewers as it went on. What began as a show that averaged 32.3 million viewers in its first half-hour, devolved into a show that averaged 25.4 million in its final half-hour of prime time.

Stewart, who previously presided over the 2006 Oscars, now goes down as the host of two of the three lowest rated Academy Awards in TV history. And in defense of Steve Martin, who hosted the 2003 misfire, that ceremony competed for attention with the start of the Iraq War. Stewart, thusly, stands alone as the lowest-rated host of relatively peaceful Oscar nights.

ABC did its best to turn its frown upside down, noting that Sunday’s telecast was far bigger than the rest of this year’s crop of low-rated award shows, including NBC’s Golden Globes debacle.

The network said the show rated highest in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, West Palm Beach, Florida, and Oscar’s hometown of Los Angeles.

Stewart’s notices were another bright spot. From Britain (the BBC called him “sparkling”) to Los Angeles (the L.A. Times found the comic “cool and loose”), and back to Missouri (”Second time’s the charm for Stewart,” headlined the Kansas City Star), Stewart won over critics.

Unlike the show.

The telecast, both a celebration of the ceremony’s 80th anniversary and, as the Hollywood Reporter pointed out, a reminder that Stewart’s writing staff was only recently back from the picket lines, was dinged for being clip-heavy.

“This wasn’t an Oscars,” wrote Deadline Hollywood’s Nikki Finke. “This was a slightly longer version of the Golden Globes announcement.”

The Washington Post’s Tom Shales said the show went “clip-clip-clipping along.” “This is not a good thing,” he decided.

Shales chided the telecast for waiting to get to the acting categories, and for waiting to present presenter Miley Cyrus until the unfriendly kid hour of nearly 10 p.m. ET.

Riffing on Oscar’s birthday, Time’s Richard Corliss said the ceremony “had the tone and pace suitable to an octogenarian’s temper.”

They each won three gold spray-painted trophies worth $4.89 (£2.48).

Murphy won three of the four worst acting categories for his comedy Norbit, which was mauled by critics.

Lohan won two worst actress Razzies for I Know Who Killed Me. The film broke records by winning eight of its nine nominations, including worst film.

This shattered a record for seven Razzie wins, previously held by Showgirls and Battlefield Earth.

Lohan also won worst screen couple for a scene in which she appears opposite herself.

In I Know Who Killed Me, she plays a small-town girl abducted by a psychopath, and an alter-ego stripper who is missing body parts. It was a major box office flop, with takings of $9m (£4.5m) worldwide.

The first cut is the deepest, as the old Cat Stevens song goes.

Then again, if Cat Stevens had been writing about the first elimination episode of American Idol’s seventh season, he’d have been completely and utterly wrong, seeing how the initial four eliminations didn’t even leave a surface wound tonight. Sure, Amy Davis, Joanne Borgella, Garrett Haley, and Colton Berry all seem like sweet, likable — or, well, at least blandly inoffensive — folks. But anyone who’s planning to tune in to Fox two or three nights a week for the next 13 weeks couldn’t have been crying like Ramiele Malubay or Asia’h Epperson at any point during tonight’s program.

Poor Garrett. You kind of knew it was all over for him when the producers snuck in his totally clueless post-performance interview clip — ”I loved it, and I can tell America will love it” — in the midst of the recap of Tuesday night’s proceedings. I had expected the kid to survive into week 2 because the sheer hideousness of his ”Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” was far more memorable than, say, Jason Yeager’s ”Moon River.” But as a friend pointed out to me over IM tonight, ”Sometimes awful is just awful.”

Plus, I’m guessing Garrett’s styling issues — broke-down mop of a ‘do, ghastly wisp of a ’stache, and pale skin that had Simon worrying he’d been locked in his bedroom for a month — contributed to his early ouster. As a message board poster named Help Me pointed out, the overall effect was simply too much: ”I looked up and there was Garrett yelling at me, ‘It puts the lotion in the basket!’ ” Another reader, however, thought Garrett’s look was more Lord of the Rings than Silence of the Lambs, kidding that there was a ”warrant out for his arrest in the shire; he stole some magic potions from a wizard and now he is wanted!” Heck, even Garrett’s fans were struggling to accept his facial hair. One reader noted that while Garrett’s newbie status made him more appealing than semipros like Michael Johns and Carly Smithson, ”I really don’t think I could vote for him with that kidstache. Wax off!”

Good news travels fast, and when Marc Anthony’s sister found out about the double blessing he and wife Jennifer Lopez had early Friday morning, she was overjoyed.

“I learned this morning. I’m ecstatic, I really am. I’m happy for her,” Yolanda Santa Maria, Anthony’s older sister, told PEOPLE Friday after hearing the birth news on Good Morning America. “She’s a mom for the first time. I can just imagine the euphoria she’s going through.”

And as for her brother? “It’s another two blessings for him. He beat me – I have four [kids] and now he has five. I’m so happy for him. I don’t even know what to say. It’s like if I had the babies.”

Santa Maria, who expects to meet her new niece and nephew soon, added, “I can’t wait to see them, I can’t wait to meet them. Words don’t even begin to express how happy I am for them.”